When was the last time you told your mobile service provider that you love them or the maker of your cell phone?

There is nothing a company wants more than to cultivate a love affair with customers. Now what’s wrong with that sentence? Well nothing really, besides the fact that its usually a LIE, and a pretty brazen one at that.

Sadly, most corporations only preach this without actually practicing it. They prefer to behave like detached creatures that loathe closeness and recoil at the slightest twinge of customer affection. They prefer “customer adoption” and “customer retention” to customer affection. They shrink back from the warm embrace of their most ardent fans.

Case in point, whenever customers become so enamored with some product or service that they are willing to contribute to its wellbeing and development by devoting copious amounts of their own free time to improving upon it, they get sued. Think Scrabulous here. Two brothers who are fans of the classic Scrabble board game create a Facebook application based on it. It becomes popular, really popular. So popular in fact that Hasbro & Mattel, the owners of the rights to the game decided to take legal action against brothers who are now pulling in about $25 000 a month on something they did on a whim based on their enjoyment of the game. What they intuitively recognized as fans of the game of Scrabble is that playing the game is a social act. It is best enjoyed when playing against family and friends and even better when you have a wide variety of opponents to challenge. What better place to connect to friends and family and huge number of possible opponents than a social network? Furthermore, they realized that it is not necessarily possible to finish a game of Scrabble in one sitting so they designed it in such a way that games could be played over long periods of time at the leisure of the players.

This really illustrates the heightened insight of the most devout customers. I mean who is really in better position to understand the customer psyche? Is it the guys sitting in the “Ivory Tower Boardroom” trying to figure out what makes people buy or the customers themselves, the people actually acting out the consumption behaviors; the individuals who feel the itch created by an unfulfilled need and spend countless hours seeking out a solution.

Connecting with customers is hard, I get that; but companies should not fool themselves either by thinking that going the easy way of dealing with “market segments”, “psycho-graphic profiles”, targeting customers, and “cardboard cutouts” is of equivalent of engaging and connecting with customers . The consequence of this is that consumption becomes abstracted from real human experience, then categorized and finally leads to objectified. The customer becomes a mere data-point in a maze of interconnected databases.

All this misses the fundamental idea that the best customers are also the best innovators because they are the most acutely attuned to the needs that are fulfilled by the various products and services they buy. So why don’t companies make it easy on themselves and simply let the customers tell them what they want? When I say this I don’t mean focus groups either.

I mean co-creation, genuine partnerships between those who consume and those work to produce such that when consumers come up with innovations they are embraced instead of slapped down with cease-and desist letters. They are given the tools, access to resources and the ability to be a part of the process that creates the things that make our lives easier, better and more enjoyable. Think of what might have happened for instance, if RIAA had worked with Napster to create a digital distribution platform for the music industry. Would there still be an Itunes?

Once you objectify your customers, you’ve completely lost touch and it’s only a matter of time before they find someone who makes them feel like they matter. It’s high time companies learned to embrace their customers and profit from Customer Affection.